Audience/Purpose
This blog is for the purpose of demonstrating how an instructional blog might be used by teachers to chronicle and reflect on their work in the classroom. Our setting is a week-long summer institute in which secondary level teachers are learning about Antebellum reform movements such as temperance, abolition, and women's rights, and the coming of the Civil War. The intended audience are the participants and anyone interested in summer professional development and/or Teaching American History projects.
Content
Blogs are not just for reporting or journaling. They have an external audience and a blogger comments on the world, especially as he/she reads the world. Often this is quite literal, and bloggers comment back and forth on each other's blog posts as well as on news and other online content. To demonstrate this, we will comment on relevant current events stories and link to other instructional blogs as much as possible. Each post in a blog should be sprinkled with links. It is an inherently interactive and inter-related medium.
Layout
Blogs are made up of the main column, with its chronological content that is also labelled for topical viewing, and one or more sidebars, where special content modules can be added. These are called "gadgets" or, commonly, widgets. They often include dynamic content from the blogger or other's other online accounts such as Flickr (photos), Twitter (microblogging), and RSS readers (aggregated content from sites and blogs the author reads). Widgets can also include things like clocks, polls, badges of membership, text, and any media. Putting your sidebar to work means choosing gadgets that underscore and support the experience you are creating for your readers and yourself.
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